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Like any good group that knows you can never overname something perfectly named (for example, Night Ranger and, also, Iron Maiden, amongst others), the first track from "Desert Marauders" is perfectly named "Rubisa Patrol", because the group that Marauds also Patrols, the desert is also somewhere we are not and will only have tried to have been. When Ozzy Osbourne sings "Please God Help Me!!!" on "Black Sabbath", from Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", he's also enacting the remaining name, the public and the political, that lies outside the personal out of which he sings. The name that is the sign, the sign that makes the name of the world. Desert Marauders maps a world that the musicians patrol, inhabit, dominate, deploy, duplicate in sound from word. There is nothing left to say, nothing less to say, than what they wordlessly leave behind them.
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All good music seems to be plagued by the failure of description. It exceeds all description, but, also, the description of the music exceeds the effort made to know it in words. Yet, there's never a reason not to try; as James Brown crooned, "Nothing beats a try but a fail". The try here is the excellence of the raucous midnight that is the 16 minute opening track, where the piano plants a staccato palm tree in the midst of a sea of sand, and what arises are the cool pool of southpaw trumpet, bass bouncing and then bobbing along the imaginary waves on an imaginary sea, the drums the thunderhead in the distance, the war planes and dreamtime drama of the new day. All of this is the failure to describe itself, only to mimic and homage Miles Davis' best years, from 1967-1975 all in a brief whisper of progressive distancing, de-stancing..
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You can't really find "Desert Marauders" on cd, I don't think. If you buy a turntable and hunt down some used records, you can pick it up on album, which is kind of cool, although probably more obscure than is necessary, because you join yourself to the legion that are their own desert marauders. those fast flipping fingered men who mine the faded cardboarded past of smudged black plastic. But then, this is necessary, so the obscurity is worth everything, even if it means you become someone you thought you'd never mean to be. The record starts, also, in a kind of obscurity, the sound of a banging piano on a simple chord, rhythmic and near, immediate and suggestive of some infinite distance beyond it. A drum trots out, silently rolling in like wind to kick up sand in the face of the blazing sky, the piano standing firm with its mechanical rhythm, one chord, full and round and stern and stoic. A horn whines, it's a trumpet but you might not know it, it might not matter what the horn whining is, it may only mean that what matters is that it whines and whimpers and breathes and burns into space. Of course, this happens for a little bit, there's a drama to building what is to come, cities are not the result of one or many days, but of every day that it takes to take what is empty and forge walls and caves and what links these two forms in the beyond of the world, above ground, reaching all arms up towards the sky.
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The thing, then, that happens, is that the piano changes and swells and advances into a rhythmic romp, a riff open to the new world -- dah-dah-dahhhhh-da-da da-da-dah-dah-dahhhhhhhh -- in a strange time signature and signalling a strange time of the world just then. Just then because of the immediacy of the change and the intensity of the tone and the open ended nature of everything that comes forth, the drums skipping down the side of the mountain and jumping into the sea, the trumpet jabbing out into space as if to knock down the danger at the edge of the desert with its pointed fists and knife-edged knuckles, the bass burrowing deep into the sand and hiding amongst the beetles and worms that sleep in the cool earth. The quiet night of the earth that arises with the cacophonic polyphony that rolls out of the record, of the circle, of the system that is theirs, that is there for us to hear.
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There's more to this record than just the opening track -- and all of it is to be known, to be heard, to feed the mind with the sound that lies inside the mind. But all of it comes after the announcement that the landscape of the moon is the empty desert the patrol will ride and protect. Protect yourself, I say, from what is out there, by venturing into the white empty distance, the black open evening. Everything is there for us all, even when we close our eyes and our eyes become the ears through which we see the dark sky, the open book of the dark sky.
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Interesting, then, that the second track on side one is called "Livre (Near The Sky)" -- a book that lies in proximity, then, to the open air that yawns over us. But what an odd juxtaposition, an impossible imposition that -- that anything is ever "near" the sky -- the sky is up there, always over us, and the only thing anything can be is "in" it. But then, when you mine the desert -- when you ride along the edge of the cursed earth, the crest of the morning and the deep crusted sand that curdles against the sea -- perhaps what you are is only where you are: near the sky, pages upturned towards the yawning night, the wordless dawn of man and of the battle for the end of time.
